Robert Jensen is currently a professor of Journalism at UT.
Jensen has written several recent articles for both academic and popular platforms built on
more or less explicitly trans-exclusionary radical feminist arguments.
In The Daily Texan, he asks what he calls the “core question” of the debate around transgender
public restrooms: “If someone is born unambiguously male as defined by chromosomes,
genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics, but claims to be female (or vice versa), what does
that actually mean?” Jensen has returned to this topic in other writings, arguing that male and
female categories assigned at birth are indispensable premises for political discourse, while
claiming to be transgender is “confusing.” Jensen believes that trans women are “males appropriating femaleness.”
Jensen writes that he respects and sympathizes with transgender people insofar as they are ill
at ease within patriarchal culture. However, he only recognizes transgender rights as a
political or lexical issue. He argues that gender transition procedures are detrimental to the
well-being of trans people, because they supposedly reinforce the essentialist male/female framework on
which patricarchal culture is built.
Monkeywrench Books has publicly severed ties with Jensen over his rhetoric on this issue,
arguing that it constitutes trans erasure, which in turn promotes violence against trans people.
